Jeanne's China Adventures

Not so swift, but safe arrival

Thu, Aug 26, 2004 - 09:00am

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Ben and I safely arrived in China last night. Even though we were marked "SSSS" Super Security Risk Travelers and got an especially thorough going over, and the hours were a bit grueling, our trip was pretty easy. I enjoyed myself quite a bit and took some neat pictures from the plane. By the time we were coming down over China my brain was pretty mushy and the landscape was quite surreal. The housing and countryside in modern China was dreamlike in that it was like nothing I could have pieced together from my own idea of reality.

The hardest thing about the trip was the drive to Changzhou from the airport. The people from the school were very nice, and although communication was difficult at times, I felt comfortable. The difficult part was staying awake. I would doze in and out, and in my half-conscious states I would think I was hearing the people in the car speaking English and saying very peculiar things. And everything we've read about Chinese driving has so far proven true. Whew! The honking helped me wake up from time to time.

We stopped at this strange roadside restaurant at about 9:30. We stopped by the public restrooms, which was great. This was my first experience with the notorious Chinese public restrooms. In the women's room there are two facing rows. One side has "Western style" sit-down toilets, while the other side has these porcelain holes in the floor that you stand on either side of and then flush with a lever on the wall. The stall doors that were there weren't working, the floor was disgusting, there was no toilet paper, and the shared sinks (men and women) had no soap or paper towels or driers.

Dinner was awkward as I tried to explain we didn't eat meat, then we discussed what was in the dishes, and how to eat them. It was so delicious! We had Chinese tea, of course, fried rice, some green vegetable I didn't recognize, scrambled eggs with green onions, a bizarre garlic and gingery soft bean curd thing, and of course soup at the end. It woke me up and it sure was tasty!

Driving through town was astonishing and eye-opening. I will have to attempt to explain it better later. . . it's beyond me right now. But we finally made it to our school, which is Hooray in the middle of downtown.
The schoolyard as seen from the roof of the administrative and ninth grade building in which we live. The two buildings directly ahead are teachers' offices, the long building on the right houses the seventh and eighth grade classes.
It is about six buildings, arranged and fenced in a square around a reddish-orange track with basketball courts in the middle. And there's a pagoda-like building. It was amazing how I immediately felt so at home because it was just like I had pictured!

The office!

Then we went inside our building, which was beautiful and new. I was astonished when we entered our apartment, which was NOT what I had expected. She opened a blonde wood door to a big office with white walls, high ceilings, blonde wood floors and dark wood and black leather office furniture. Then a little hall with the big bathroom with a shower room, and then the bedroom. The bedroom has one wall that is curtained windows about waist high to the ceiling. The other wall is covered with blonde wood cabinets that are more closet than we can imagine filling. There is a pretty blonde wood bed (full size?) Two night stands, two little cabinets with drawers, a computer desk and another dark wood and black leather chair. There is a freestanding a/c unit, a BIG and NEW TV, and a small computer of unknown make running an old version of windows in Chinese. Ben immediately began formulating plans for it.

We did a bit of unpacking, then hit the hay in a serious way (Ben only after he had established our internet connection). We had been awake at this point (other than some short dozes in the car) for more than 30 hours. This morning we woke up early (for whatever reason) and unpacked. We got a better look out our bedroom window. We are on the third floor and our bedroom window faces out to the street, across which is the largest park in the city! So we have trees and a pond across a little street full of bikes and honking cars. And above that this totally bizarre and cool building.

Our tasty breakfast which our supervisor called "pancakes."

We just finished eating the breakfast our coworker who has been helping us brought by. It was "pancakes": flaky round things that are like a mix between a biscuit and a pastry, with a gooey sweet layer at the bottom and sesame seeds on top, and rice porrige: which is like watery dark brown oat meal with rice in it which came in a plastic cup and you eat it through a thick straw. It was delicious. I'm glad to see the Chinese are still far from going low-carb.

Well, it's time to meet our helper to get a pay advance so we can do some shopping.

First Day's Adventures - Part I

Thu, Aug 26, 2004 - 05:00pm

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So, as day one nears its end, I am exhausted and amazed at how many amazing things we have seen and done, while all we really did was go walk and shop for three and a half hours, come back and take a long nap, walk less than a block for a noodle dinner, then walk home. Everything is so new!

I reflected to Ben than (so far) I am really happy we are in this city, which is not at all designed to accommodate English-speaking visitors. There will be no getting around learning some Chinese.

We met again with our coworker helper this morning. She gave us a pay advance so that we didn't need to go to an exchange and then we talked some more about our teaching position. We learned:

This is indeed a junior high school - grades 7, 8, and 9

There was one British teacher here last year who taught all the spoken English classes, but the classes were about 60 students each, which was difficult. They decided that for us they would break the classes apart by gender. Ben will travel from classroom to classroom. When it is time for English class he will go to the classroom, then the girls will leave and come to my classroom and the boys will stay with him. So we'll always be teaching at the same time, and I'll always be in the same room.

We will definitely have weekends off, and she has given us Friday afternoons off to accommodate weekend travel.

We indeed have no provided teaching materials. She said we can ask if we need help about something, but it sounds like it is up to us.

We asked about a copy machine and she said they have overhead projectors in the room. So I'm guessing that copies may be up to us.

On the thirtieth she will give us a times table of our classes and show us around the school. We headed out into the city with some vague directions on how to get to a supermarket. We are in dire need of some necessities like toilet paper, bottled water, a bath mat, and some clothes hangers.

Walking down the street here is a real adventure. The assertion we had read that there are no beggars in China is apparently false. We've seen three or four, and they're fairly pushy. But at least we can pretend we don't know what they want. We've seen men leading monkeys, vendors selling melon slices on sticks, vending machines with cigarettes and condoms in them, a woman with a facial deformity much to big to be a goiter - no idea what it is - and so much more.
On the bustling streets of Changzhou, every day is an adventure.
Crossing the street is even more of an adventure. And pretty terrifying. If you are in the middle of the crosswalk when the light changes - which is quite possible if you start crossing the street while the pedestrian sign is green - you had better stop or you WILL be run over.

The books and websites we read warned about the staring, and it is indeed awkward. People look at us like we are from another planet. And smiling is definitely no guarantee people will smile back at you. So far since we have been in Changzhou we have seen zero other Westerners, so I can see why.

Not being able to read the names of stores is a bummer. We went into a number of places looking for the supermarket, including what we think was a library. We found a lot of electronics and appliances. The selection of digital cameras here puts to shame every place Ben and I went to in the US looking for them (although we didn't see ours). We also found a lot of clothes, and a remarkable amount of musical instruments, new and used. There were a lot of bookstores and office supply places with fun notebooks and stuff. In the biggest bookstore we saw, we went up to the English section and read phrases like "I need to find a playmate who can play tennis very well" and "I think the economy will recover soon."

We stopped at a roadside produce stand, where a woman insisted on giving us some small round fruits we didn't recognize. With the use of a calculator, she and Ben discussed the price of the bananas he wanted to buy - all they had were Del Monte. How swell. He ended up paying 5.3 renminbi, or about 64 cents, for about seven or eight bananas. He said "Thank you for the little potatoes" and we left.
A Chinese woman looks at the movies of blonde Western women being played on the TVs for sale.
One of the most distracting things was the TVs for sale. Here they have these movies made especially for selling TVs that feature Western women, usually blondes, doing all sorts of interesting things. Like crossing greased up legs, slowly eating pudding (camera zooms in on lips), smelling flowers, turning around slowly in bathing suits as the camera pans across their body, slowly lowering their hair into water, etc. etc.

Don't worry, we have a McDonald's, KFC, and a church nearby.

Exhausted, we headed back to the school, noting that there were a couple of noodle parlors and snack shops just outside the gate where we could return for dinner. We were greeted kindly again by the guards and headed to our room to crash.

First Day's Adventures - Part II

Thu, Aug 26, 2004 - 10:00pm

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We forgot to check the exchange rate before we went shopping, although we had a vague idea what it was. When we got back we just had to see what it was, and sat there in sticker shock for a while. The electronics and housewares are priced similarly to there, but the clothes and DVDs are crazy cheap! The most expensive DVD we saw was $4.38.

After our nice long nap, we woke up and took out our dictionaries to prepare for going out for dinner noodles. I took out a flash card and wrote the characters for vegetarian ("sushi") on it. We walked out, waving at the guards, and walked up a street that seemed entirely different from the one we had been on earlier. It gets dark here at like 6:30 pm. As much as I love sunlight, I have to say it was nice for it to be so nice and cool. Stepping onto the street at about 8:30, there was almost no one out. Most of the shops had been closed, by pulling down a metal garage door type thing over the wide entrance that serves as a storefront.

We were very happy to see that our noodle shop was still open. We walked in, walked up to the counter to a nervous looking woman, and I handed her the vegetarian card. Ben, who had prepared in a more verbal way, said "women xiang miantiao sushi," which is to say, "We would like noodles - vegetarian." There was a little back and forth that was confusing to me, and she got another man to come up and help her, although he spoke no English as far as I could tell. Soon she said "Liang ge?" or "Two?" We said yes, and easily worked out the money part. Thankfully paying is about the easiest thing. The man came back up with an egg and asked a question which I assume was "Are eggs okay?" or something to that effect, and we responded in the affirmative. We sat down in the eating area, with nice fans from above and tried to decipher the menu a little bit. We decided next time we would take a picture so that we can take it home and figure it out at our leisure.
Delicious noodles for about $.86 a plate.
They brought out the food, two heaping plates of freshly made noodles (you can watch them making them through the window from the street) with lots of peppers, onions of various sizes, huge chunks of garlic, diced tomatoes, zucchini, and fried eggs. These were some seriously tasty noodles. Then they brought out the soup, which was also delicious and topped with cilantro. The Chinese don't seem to drink while they eat much. There didn't appear to be any drinks on the menu. The soup kind of served that purpose. The meal - heaping pile of noodles and vegetables and a bowl of soup - cost us each about 86 cents. We stuffed ourselves, then happily sauntered home, climbed back up the stairs to our room, where we are now sitting and working on our computers and will soon watch a movie.

Tomorrow we will try again to find our essentials, having only succeeded today in getting drinks, bananas, and some unknown fruits that look like little potatoes. And we'll also try to buy some of that Icy Mint Sprite we saw today. Definitely curious about that!